Friday 20 August 2010

Eidetic Dreaming

Have you ever gone to sleep, dreamed, and recognised that you are dreaming? This is Lucid Dreaming, or Eidetic Dreaming. When it happens, you marvel at the reality of the dream. There is so much incredible detail; you focus on the detail, and it grows in vivid complexity. Could this incredible detail, which surprises you, really have been created by you? Could you be surprising yourself?

No one who experiences this can be a solipsist. Even your own dreams are other.

When you wake up, is your body really you? Do you know exactly what is going on in your own liver? Do you know what is going on in your own kidneys? Your own body is something other than you that needs investigation by you in order to be known (another serious blow to an aspiring solipsist).

Being conscious when you are awake is like knowing that you are dreaming when you are asleep. That is not to say that waking life is the same as dreaming. It isn't. But there is a similarity in that you see everything as extraordinarily vivid and surprising and also you recognise that all creation comes from somewhere else (God). This is the way not to be a zombie! A baby is usually born conscious, and with practice you may well remember what that was like. Being conscious means that you will have an automatic understanding of children.

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